Damn The Torpedoes! Full Steam Ahead!

The Obama administration, headed up by a liberal dogma that has been trying to create it’s socialist utopia since Woodrow Wilson is not going to give up it’s sole dream of controlling everyone and everything ‘for their own good’ and “fairness”.

But it is curious that the Europeans who already went down this road in large part are starting to go back in our former direction.
It’s kind of like driving towards a massive accident and seeing people coming back from it bloodied and hurt, but you decide it can’t happen to me so you keep going anyhow.
That’s National Health Care now nearly 5 months after it was crammed down the throats of the American public in the single most partisan vote in memory.
Damn The Torpedoes! Full Steam ahead!

LONDON — Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain’s socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.
Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.
Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.
The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government’s goal to effect $30 billion in “efficiency savings” in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished. (London Times)


So like the G20 Summit where “austerity” was the watchword by the Europeans and Obama stood there stamping his foot demanding people spend even more.
Not only are the Democrats and their dream out of date they are out of step even with the people they still want to dance with.
They wanted to be them.
Now it’s too late.
But that won’t stop them, of course.
Zealots who have been waiting 80 years+ for this will not be so easily deterred.
But the effects of this are beginning.

MANDEVILLE, La.—Mark Baumann, a 44-year-old uninsured diabetic, sees in the Obama administration’s health-care law a future with stable coverage to pay for his insulin shots and blood tests.
That’s likely to come indirectly at the expense of his mother’s generous health-care plan.
Humana Inc., Mary Baumann’s insurer, intends to pare her “Medicare Advantage” plan to make up for the smaller government payments it will soon receive as a result of the new law, leaving her with higher costs or fewer services. On the table are beefed-up co-payments and premiums, as well as the loss of perks such as her free membership at a health club.
Most Americans know the overhaul is designed to cover the uninsured, a decades-long goal of Democrats. But it also represents a change in how the government spreads its social safety net underneath Americans. Already, it’s creating tensions that are a harbinger of debates to come.
Since the creation of Social Security and Medicare, younger workers have funded programs for the elderly. It’s a compact in which workers paid for retirees with the understanding that they’d be looked after by the generation behind them.
The health overhaul diverges by tapping a program for the elderly to help provide insurance to 32 million Americans of younger generations. Nearly half the funding for the law is supposed to come from paying lower fees to hospitals, insurers and other health-care providers that participate in Medicare, the federal insurance program for Americans age 65 and older, as well as younger disabled people.
The 44 million Americans on Medicare won’t see changes to their guaranteed benefits under the law. But of those, 11.3 million on Medicare Advantage plans, a public-private hybrid of the type used by Ms. Baumann, who is 79, are likely to begin seeing extra benefits go away as soon as next year. Medicare Advantage cuts are slated to pay for 15% of the health-care law’s tab.
The trims mark the leading edge of a spending shift that could broaden as lawmakers grapple with a deficit expected to hit $1.47 trillion this year. Left unchanged, Medicare and Social Security will consume half of all federal spending by 2035, up from about one third today, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

And remember, by recess appointment an NHS-loving administrator is the head of Medicare.
And if, as predicted by many, including me, that private health insurance is driven completely to extinction then you’ll have health cost also in that GDP soup and with already half the people in this country not paying any taxes it does very bleak.
But at least it’s “fair”.
And, of course, the solution that will be published after the election by Obama’s “deficit commission” is a forgone conclusion, The VAT TAX and other taxes.
Then came Financial “reform” where one of the biggest cause of the problem, just like in Health Care (Trial Lawyers anyone?), were ignored because of partisan politics — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
And then with the massive tax increases, even on the poor, slated for Jan 1,2011 you have the perfect storm.
But the Democrats will not change course. You know that. I know now that. They know that.
Damn the Torpedoes! Full Steam ahead!
They don’t care how many European train wrecks occur.
It’s their time and they will do it anyhow!
For “fairness” and “equality” and “social justice”!


Meanwhile, the rationing the Democrats say will not happen here are happening in their beloved NHS, acocrding to the  liberal Sun Telegraph newspaper:

Some of the most common operations — including hip replacements and cataract surgery — will be rationed as part of attempts to save billions of pounds, despite government promises that front-line services would be protected.

Patients’ groups have described the measures as “astonishingly brutal”.

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered widespread cuts planned across the NHS, many of which have already been agreed by senior health service officials. They include:
* Restrictions on some of the most basic and common operations, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic procedures.
* Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.
* The closure of nursing homes for the elderly.
* A reduction in acute hospital beds, including those for the mentally ill, with targets to discourage GPs from sending patients to hospitals and reduce the number of people using accident and emergency departments.
* Tighter rationing of NHS funding for IVF treatment, and for surgery for obesity.
* Thousands of job losses at NHS hospitals, including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages.
* Cost-cutting programmes in paediatric and maternity services, care of the elderly and services that provide respite breaks to long-term carers.

And now back to US…

“We badly need to, over time and very gradually, reallocate resources from the elderly to younger families and their children,” said Isabel Sawhill, senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution.
“I’m sure that some of those additional benefits have been nice,” Nancy-Ann DeParle, who runs the White House’s Office of Health Reform, says of Medicare Advantage plans. “But I think what we have to look at here is what’s fair and what’s important for the strength of the Medicare program long term.”

Sun Telegraph: The Government has promised to protect the overall budget of the NHS, which will continue to receive above-inflation increases, but said the service must make “efficiency savings” of up to £20 billion by 2014, which would be diverted back to the front line.
Brother from another socialist mother?
Dr Peter Carter, the head of the Royal College of Nursing, said he was “incredibly worried” about the disclosures.
Dr Carter said: “Andrew Lansley keeps saying that the Government will protect the front line from cuts – but the reality appears to be quite the opposite. We are seeing trusts making job cuts even when they have already admitted to being short staffed.

Trust boards are the ones who make the health care calls now.
Much like the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology  that was in the Stimulus Bill.
And we won’t even go over the Food Police again this time.

Sun Telegraph: On Thursday, the board of Sutton and Merton primary care trust (PCT) in London agreed more than £50 million of savings in two years. The plan included more than £400,000 to be saved by “reducing length of stay” in hospital for the terminally ill.
As well as sending more patients home to die, the paper said the savings would be made by admitting fewer terminally ill cancer patients to hospital because they were struggling to cope with symptoms such as pain. Instead, more patients would be given advice on “self management” of their condition.
Bill Gillespie, the trust’s chief executive, said patients would stay at home, or be discharged from hospital only if that was their choice, and would be given support in their homes.

The president told the {New York Times in 2008}magazine that the chronically ill and elderly represent 80 percent of American healthcare costs, and said, “(T)here is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place.”
“And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance,” he added.
That “independent group” turns out to be the government, now run by him. Funny how that worked out.


But the president questioned whether his now-deceased grandmother should have received her hip replacement while suffering a terminal illness.
Recounting the dilemma, Obama said, “(T)he question was, does she get hip replacement surgery even though she was fragile enough that they weren’t sure how long she would last (or) whether she could get through the surgery.”
“I think families all across America are going through decisions like that all the time,” Obama said.
This was not the first time the president had used his grandmother to illustrate his point on health care. In an April 2008 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Obama suggested much of the cost of health care in America comes from the elderly and those with chronic illness.
“That’s where you get into some very difficult moral issues,” Obama said – specifically considering whether “in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question.”

This was BEFORE he became president mind you. But the Journo-List inspired Media was not going to let you dwell on it.
2009 Newsweek article on the “The Five biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate”:
What we can say is that there is de facto rationing under the current system, by both Medicare and private insurance. No plan covers everything, but coverage decisions “are now made in opaque ways by insurance companies,” says Dr. Donald Berwick of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
Donald Berwick? Where have I heard that name recently.
Oh yeah, he’s the guy who was appointed by Obama as Head of Medicare and Medicaid without Senate approval by a recess appointment and he’s an admitted lover of the NHS.
Gee, that couldn’t be a coincidence now could it?


The {Health Care} law will spend $938 billion over a decade, mostly to expand coverage to lower-income Americans. To finance that, there will be $455 billion coming from cuts in government payments to health-care providers that serve patients on Medicare and two other federal programs. The hardest hit—to the tune of $136 billion—will be private insurance companies that run Medicare Advantage plans.
The payment cuts to Medicare Advantage begin in 2012.
“With the president being younger, my biggest concern is that we don’t mean anything,” said Sandy Reed, a 61-year-old who has a Medicare Advantage plan because she qualifies as disabled. “We’re disposable.”
‘Death Panels’ indeed…
And it has come out on the Daily Caller in their further investigation of the Journo-List scandal that the Mainstream media were in full bore mode of destruction when Gov. Palin was announced as McCain’s running mate.
All that savagery was plotted out.
So what you do when your opponent speaks the truth to power, destroy her.
So that’s why the ‘death panels’ comment was so widely and uniformly from left mocked, dismissed and discredited.
To this very day she is the most hated woman in America by the Left.

Most of the rest will be funded by new levies, including taxes on health-care companies, a higher Medicare payroll tax for wealthy Americans and a tax on high-value insurance plans. Critics of the law say its total cost is likely higher than advertised.
But it’s not like the Democrats actually care.
Their one and only shot at injecting their socialist cancer, that they’ve been waiting since their grandparents time in many cases, is all that matters.
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
But at least it’s “fair”.

The Politics of Food

As an amateur home cook and a junkie for The Food Network and other Food Shows I take food seriously.
But not like our President and his Food Nazis.
And no, I don’t mean “Seinfeld”.
This is not a comedy.
This is your usual socialist tragedy.
Busy bodies with a moral superiority complex.

You may laugh about the White House assistant chef being appointed “Senior Policy Adviser.” You’ll stop laughing when you realize that those in power really do want to tell you what to eat.
You just can’t cook these things up. The 29-year-old Chicago chef that the Obama family for years paid to be their private cook, Sam Kass, was quietly promoted last month from his job as assistant chef at the White House residence and “food initiative coordinator” to the position of “senior policy adviser for healthy food initiatives.”
The long-suffering American people don’t get to know if an increase in salary is involved, because Kass is on the residence staff rather than the West Wing’s.
But we should know how much the taxpayers are paying this “bald, intense young man” who, according to the New York Times, is “part chef and part policy wonk” and is “reinventing the role of official gastronome in the Executive Mansion.”
He plays golf with the president at Martha’s Vineyard, attends the administration’s child-health briefings, and quizzes senior White House staff about policy.
“Do we have a toxicologist who specializes in colony collapse disorder?” Kass once asked in an e-mail to the Agriculture Department, according to the New York Times story.
Add the fact that Kass isn’t even a formally trained chef and you really start to wonder what’s going on here.
The law lets the president appoint anyone he wants as “senior policy adviser.” But if he wants to be the first president to employ a cook/food czar, he should make that plain to the public — and publish the man’s taxpayer-funded salary, as is the case with other White House policy advisers.
Of course, it all begs the question: Why on earth do the American people need a government-paid “food initiative coordinator”? This administration has been attempting to elevate nutrition to the level of a civil rights issue.
How much harassment is enough in regard to food? New York City has opened the door for every local government to ban trans fats. Then there are the ubiquitous nutrition labels on every food item in supermarkets and fast-food restaurants.
The food nannies are everywhere. Now in the White House, too.
If President Obama really wants to appoint a butcher, baker or candlestick maker to a top White House policy job, we humbly propose a better suggestion: Joe the Plumber. (IBD)
Because it’s such a dire situation, she has convinced her husband’s administration to spend $400 million a year to bring “healthy foods” to low-income neighborhoods and $10 billion to revise a decades-old federal measure that already feeds tens of millions of poor children at school for free.
This culinary revolution no doubt requires a trusted senior policy adviser—like Kass—who is an expert in healthy cuisine. The First Lady refers to her cook as a “partner in crime” and says it’s “just pretty powerful” to see what started out as talk in her South Side Chicago kitchen turn into a major initiative that “hopefully will change the way we think as a country.”
Makes you wonder what Kass, who also doubles as a White House chef, has been putting in the Obama’s food all these years. Incidentally, the “most transparent administration” in history doesn’t want Americans to know how much the famous family cook earns. Although he’s an important administration wonk, Kass’s salary is excluded in the Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff because he’s considered “residence staff” and those salaries don’t need to be disclosed. (Judicial Watch)


Even the private chef of the President is a political hack, for god’s sake!
Yet more “czars” from the “I’m not a socialist!” President.


In a statement released on June 22, the liberal Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) announced it was filing a lawsuit against McDonald’s for marketing toys with their signature Happy Meals. The statement’s creepy hyperbole nearly implied that Ronald McDonald should be featured on an episode of “To Catch a Predator:”

“’McDonald’s is the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children,” said CSPI litigation director Stephen Gardner.
And the Liberal Media just easts it up.
“But would children still be happy with their meal without the joy of a new toy? That’ll be up to kids, and possibly a judge,” chided NBC’s Erika Edwards.
“It’s entirely appropriate and not at all intrusive for city government to take steps to discourage the sale of sugary sodas on city property.”–San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom after he “regulated” the sale of non-diet drinks in city vending machines.

“On its own, popcorn is a low-fat, low-cal, whole grain food,” said Good Morning America’s consumer correspondent Elizabeth Leamy, “but the Center (for Science in The Public Interest) says that the way some movie theaters prepare it, it’s more like eating a rack of ribs with a scoop of ice cream on top.”
UK Daily Mail: Teachers have used ‘Big Brother’ tactics to spy on children’s lunchboxes, it has been revealed. They secretly photographed pupils’ packed lunches over six months and analysed the contents.
Staff awarded marks to the food and then showed their findings to outraged parents, offering them advice on how to improve nutrition.
Education bosses have now put a stop to the scheme in Gloucestershire after discovering the extent of the surveillance.
Nineteen primary schools have been using the ‘packed lunch toolkit’, which was devised by Gloucestershire county council and NHS Gloucestershire.
Contents were taken out of a random sample of lunchboxes and then photographs taken.
Staff rated the contents against set nutritional standards. They looked for high fat, salt and sugary foods as well as fruit and vegetables.
NHS= National Health Service. HHS= Health and Human Services.
Brothers from a different mother?
But Yvette Gayle, whose nine-year-old daughter Renee Dougan attends the school, said she didn’t mind.
‘It might encourage parents to pack a healthier lunch for their kids anyway,’ she said.
Cheryl Ridler, an education co-ordinator at the school, said the scheme has led to ‘a definite improvement in the quality of food’ brought in.
‘All the parents were very positive about it and we did it in a very nice and careful way, and in no way demanding and intrusive,’ she added.
Big Brother smiles upon you Citizen. Rejoice.


Maybe we could have a reality show, showing a Nutritional Intervention or maybe an actual Food Police show, showcasing the worst slovenly, offensive offenders against the public good.
Unfortunately, it is their business, because too many of us have insisted on treating healthcare services as an entitlement rather than a commodity. As a result, we’ve implicitly given government the permission to interfere with anything having to do with “public health,” including our food choices. And for the most part, many people support these dumb food bans because they imagine it’s doing some kind of good. I find it hard to believe that could be true. As the failed war on drugs has taught us, government regulation is no match for the forces of supply and demand.(411mania.com)

And where have we heard of Health Care as an entitlement?
The Left
Who are the Food Police?
The Left.
Funny how that worked out.

And with Comedy comes Tragedy.
And her it is folks.
The reason why the Food Police are coming to get you.
You’re too Fat!!!, and that’s a negative impact on ObamaCare.
So we can’t have that.
If the government gets to decide who lives and who dies, they get to decide what you eat as well.
It’s for your own good, after all.
Rejoice.


Obesity Rating for Every American Must Be Included in Stimulus-Mandated Electronic Health Records, Says HHS

(CNSNews.com) – New federal regulations issued this week stipulate that the electronic health records–that all Americans are supposed to have by 2014 under the terms of the stimulus law that President Barack Obama signed last year–must record not only the traditional measures of height and weight, but also the Body Mass Index: a measure of obesity. The obesity-rating regulation states that every American’s electronic health record must: “Calculate body mass index. Automatically calculate and display body mass index (BMI) based on a patient’s height and weight.”
The law also requires that these electronic health records be available–with appropriate security measures–on a national exchange.
The new regulations are one of the first steps towards the government’s goal of universal adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) by 2014, as outlined in the 2009 economic stimulus law.  Specifically, the regulations issued on Tuesday by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Dr. David Blumenthal, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, define the “meaningful use” of electronic records. Under the stimulus law, health care providers–including doctors and hospitals–must establish “meaningful use” of EHRs by 2014 in order to qualify for federal subsidies. After that, they will be subjected to penalties in the form of diminished Medicare and Medicaid payments for not establishing “meaningful use” of EHRs.
Section 3001 of the stimulus law says: “The National Coordinator shall, in consultation with other appropriate Federal agencies (including the National Institute of Standards and Technology), update the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan (developed as of June 3, 2008) to include specific objectives, milestones, and metrics with respect to the following: (i) The electronic exchange and use of health information and the enterprise integration of such information.‘‘(ii) The utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014.”
Under this mandate in the stimulus law, Secretary Sebelius issued a regulation–developed by Dr. Blumenthal–that requires that all EHRs keep track of a person’s Body Mass Index (BMI) score. Body Mass Index is a ratio between a person’s weight and height, and is used to determine whether or not someone is overweight or obese. It is the preferred method of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for measuring obesity.
Michelle Obama has made dealing with the problem of childhood obesity the main theme of her term as First Lady.

According to the CDC,  “BMI provides a reliable indicator of body fatness for most people and is used to screen for weight categories that may lead to health problems.”
A person’s BMI score is used as a tool to screen for obesity or excessive body fat that could lead to other health problems. While it does not actually measure body fat directly, according to CDC, the BMI scores generally correlate with a person’s body fat percentage.
The new regulations also stipulate that the new electronic records be capable of sending public health data to state and federal health agencies such as HHS and CDC. The CDC, which calls American society “obesogenic” – meaning that American society itself promotes obesity – collects BMI scores from state health agencies every year to monitor obesity nationwide.
“Electronically record, retrieve, and transmit syndrome based public health surveillance information to public health agencies,” the regulations read.
With the spread of electronic health records, the CDC apparently will be able to collect such data more efficiently and with greater accuracy because the electronic record keeping systems can send the data automatically, eliminating the need for government – both state and federal – to keep, send, and process physical records.

So how long until the BMI Tax or mandatory “health education”??
So you want that Big Mac, well, there’s a 20%  surcharge Tax and we have to record how many of them you have and when you have reached your limit you will not be allowed to eat it anymore until such time as the National Coordinator’s guidelines for your better health says so.
How far off is that?
Not far enough for my tastes.
But that’s why I was so vehemently against the whole thing to begin with.
But what do I know, I’m just a “racist” “teabagger” “idiot” who wants what’s bad for you, at least according to the Left and it’s Media pit bulls.
Have that Big Mac now, because in a few years it will be banned or so heavily regulated and taxed it will cost you $20 for just one and it will have to be registered with the HHS.
And if your BMI says you can’t have it, well, the Food Police will coming knocking on your door to “educate” you Citizen.
Just you wait and see.
Big Momma Michelle is watching you…

It's Recess Time Children

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama bypassed the Senate Wednesday and appointed Dr. Donald Berwick, a Harvard professor and patient care specialist, to run Medicare and Medicaid.

The decision to use a so-called recess appointment to install Berwick as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services drew immediate fire from the GOP. Republicans have raised concerns about Berwick’s views on rationing of care and other matters and said it was wrong for Obama to go around the normal Senate confirmation process. That view was echoed by a key Democratic committee chairman, although the recess appointment is a tool used by presidents of both parties.
“Democrats haven’t scheduled so much as a committee hearing for Donald Berwick but the mere possibility of allowing the American people the opportunity to hear what he intends to do with their health care is evidently reason enough for this administration to sneak him through without public scrutiny,” said McConnell, R-Ky.
Could that be because Dr Berwick has been quoted as saying he “loves” the NHS (the British Health Care system) and that rationing of care is absolutely necessary and that it also a “redistribution of wealth” issue??
Gee, I wonder why no one wanted to talk about that?
Berwick, 63, is a pediatrician, Harvard University professor and leader of a health care think tank, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, that works to develop and implement concepts for improving patient care. The programs he will oversee — Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly, poor and disabled, along with the Children’s Health Insurance Program — provide care to about 100 million people, or around 1 in 3 Americans.
So he’s yet another Harvard Ivy Tower Academic Liberal.
I know I’m excited.

Dr Berwin: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly.“
April 2009: Senator Max Baucus, told CNSNews in April, “There is no rationing of health care at all” in the proposed reform. (and the Baucus bill was the ‘bi-partisan’ one!)
He was the Chair of the committee that wouldn’t schedule the hearings on the Doctor’s confirmation, by the way.
And The President ran around during the debate last year that saying  “rationing” was just a scare tactic.
Hmmm…
It’s just those echoes of the health care debate that Democrats would prefer not to replay on the Senate floor.
So let’s not and say we did, and just call the whole thing off and just appoint him without any coverage at all.
Let’s just sweep it under the rug…Nothing to see here….


Dr Berwin 2008: “Any health care funding plan that is just equitable civilized and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.”
Redistribution of wealth? Where have I heard that before?
Karl Marx?
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.


“If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.”
“But, The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.
“One of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that.” —That would be Illinois State Senator Barack Obama in 2001.

In Obama’s America, we’ll finally be able to break free of the “constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution” — and in so doing, achieve “social justice” through “redistributive change.”
Well, then. Fine .
But this is not the America I knew… (Michelle Malkin)

So the “transparent” President strikes again.
Only, what he’s transparent about isn’t what people thought he meant by that when they foolishly voted for him.
“I am romantic about the National Health Service,” he told a London audience in 2008, referring to the British single-payer system. “I love it,” Dr. Berwick added, going on to call it “such a seductress” and “a global treasure.” He routinely points to the NHS as a health-care model for the U.S. (WSJ)

According to a “topline message points” document on his nomination that we obtained, “The fact is, rationing is rampant in the system today, as insurers make arbitrary decisions about who can get the care they need. Don Berwick wants to see a system in which those decisions are transparent—and that the people who make them are held accountable.”
The people who can write such things with a straight face believe there is no difference between rationing through individual choices and price signals and rationing through politics and bureaucratic omniscience. In an influential 1996 book “New Rules,” Dr. Berwick and a co-author argued that one of “the primary functions” of health regulation is “to constrain decentralized, individual decision making” and “to weigh public welfare against the choices of private consumers.”

He then recommended “protocols, guidelines, and algorithms for care,” with the “common underlying notion that someone knows or can discover the ‘best way’ to carry out a task to reach a decision, and that improvement can come from standardizing processes and behaviors to conform to this ideal model.” And guess who will determine the “best way”?
As I said repeatedly during the Health care “debate”, the government wants to decide who lives and who dies.
Nothing more, Nothing Less.
Now doesn’t that make you feel better.